Blending Images in Photoshop for Very Clear Pictures

In the last post on aperture, we saw that shooting at F5 gives you clarity on the front portion of the image but blurry on the back.

So, what if we want a picture in F5 quality and get the full image to be clear?

The answer is focus stacking – this means taking multiple photos, each with a different area of the product in focus and then blending it into one final image using Photoshop. Photoshop takes each image, analyzes the pixels to find the areas in focus and stitches them together into the final image.

How to Blend Multiple Images in Photoshop

1. Take multiple photos

Here is a pic showing 5 images taken with different areas in focus. The red box in the screen below indicates where the camera will focus. To set the focus area, move the box around the image by using the arrow keys that are on most cameras. Or if you have a touch screen, touch the area you want the camera to focus on.

Here are the resulting images – the green arrow shows you where the camera is focusing – that’s the area that is clear, the rest of the necklace is blurry because at F5, depth of focus is low.

2. Load and Align Images in Photoshop

Next, we load these files together in Photoshop so we can blend them into one final image. Go to File > Scripts > Load files into Stack…

This will show you a window like the below – click on browse and select all the files. I have a total of 7 photos, each with a different area in focus. Loading as a stack means that each image loads one on top of the other as layers.

Check the box at the bottom that says ‘automatically align source images’ – this tells Photoshop that if there is a slight movement between images (for e.g. if your tripod moved slightly between shots), Photoshop will align images to account for that movement.

3. Blend Images

This is the final step. Select all layers (hold ctrl or cmd and click on all layers to select). Go to Edit > Auto-Blend Layers…

You’ll see this window – leave the default settings at ‘Stack Images’ and check the two boxes below.

Here is the final blended output showing the necklace fully clear.

How does Photoshop do this? Look on the bottom right – you’ll see all the different images with a black/white icon – that is a layer mask. In a layer mask, black means that part of the image is hidden and white means visible. What Photoshop does is hide the blurry areas (black) in each image and keep the clear areas visible (white). So the final image only has the clear areas visible.

Here is the final image – I cropped it and added some contrast.

If you have questions, leave a comment and I will answer. Hope this helped.